Dunkum

In no particular order...

 

Raymond E. Feist's Midkemia series. Magician is still one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read, but it goes majorly downhill towards the end.

I reread some of those last year, and I had the opposite reaction.  the later books, the ones that focus a bit more on the politics of the kingdom, are the ones that seemed stronger to me.  It doesn't help that, by the end of like the second or third book, your good guys include 3 of the most powerful beings in the universe.  With that kind of power, it gets to be a bit hard to believe that they are struggling with anything.

Do we know how precise malatium is?

 

In the belly of a skilled burner, how precise could it be? With practice could Vin have deliberately seen when Rashek was a newborn infant? Could she have seen him naked, the last time he took a shower?

 

Can it see the general history of a physical location, objects and scenery included? (Atium tracks inanimate objects as well as people, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to speculate that malatium is capable of the inverse.) If so, then it could essentially function as full retrocognition, and could be used to uncover any possible secret in a person's past.

 

If any of this speculation is even remotely accurate, I'd be most scared of malatium. The potential for abuse is limitless.

I think the general idea is that it works similar to gold, but for another person.  So based on Vin's use of it, and Miles's gold burning scene, it seems that it should let you see an alternate version of the person if they had made different choices.  So while it can reveal some secrets if you know how to read what you are seeing, I doubt it could do anything like directly reproduce scenes from someone's past

i believe "strength of the squires" refer to the fact that his squires also get to fight better than they should. think about it. every member of bridge 4 is now an elite fighter, despite the fact that each one of them was judged unworthy by society to start with. they also had much less training than regular soldiers.

and he also did it in amaram's army, taking under his protection the smallest, weakest spearmen and consistently making them the best in the army.

as we say in italy, one can't get blood out of a turnip. while  kaladin is good at inspiring and leading people, it is possible some of that comes from the radiant power. it is possible that his power consists in getting blood out of a turnip.

Well bear in mind that carrying a bridge is obscenely good strength and endurance training.  It's true that the bridgemen seem to learn the spear a bit quickly, but at least part of it is from the fact that by the time they start, they are just ridiculously physically fit.

Have to go brass/zinc.  The ability to actively manipulate someone's emotions allomantically seems much more invasive than just being able to see past/alternate versions of the person.

Yeah, then I'd just have to draw into a Putrefy to destroy the Scepter or Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord to sac my hydra for the win. With the hydra doubling/tripling every turn.

oh there are ways around it, but each time I have to alter my deck to add them in, it becomes less and less like I want it.  Also, the friend I have probably played against the most has about 20 different ways to shut down my green weenie deck, including some ways to shut down my attempts to shut down his defenses.  Basically by the time I can amass an army, he has so many redundant layers of defense that I can't touch him.

That's as a good a description as I would be able to come up with myself.  It's very hit or miss with him for me, too.  I loved the Enderverse books (except for maybe the most recent ones), Enchantment, Lost Boys, Invasive Procedures and Pastwatch were just fine, Sarah and Rachel & Leah (haven't read Rebekah), Empire (still haven't read Hidden Empire), but felt "eh" about the Homecoming Series, Alvin Maker, Worthing and Wyrms.  I still have to read anything but the first Pathfinder and Lost Gate books, but I liked the first installments well enough to plan to finish those.  Most of his stuff falls in the love it or not so excited about it (I wouldn't say hate) categories, though.

I like all the enderverse books, but the first two are definitely pretty far superior to the others.  Other than those I have read homecoming and Alvin maker series.  Homecoming, I thought had some potential early on, then just kind of devolved into something else.

That's the story of my life, minus the coppermind.

likewise.

Yeah. A ghostly prison would have reduced my swing to 1400, only 1000 of which would be trample.

Isochron Scepter + Holy Day is what always killed me.  Doesn't matter how much you throw at them when they can just prevent it all.

Heartfire (and the Alvin Maker series in general) was pretty meh, I thought.  then again, my interest in that series is almost exclusively due to the alternate history timeline, and looking at the differences between real world America and Alvin's America.  Modesitt's Recluse books I enjoyed, though.

Cool.

Dammit I knew I was forgetting a series. Dune!! Epicness in the original 6 bks. I read them in 2001. I did read the 2 bks based on his notes to finish up the story but I will never read any of the other bks by them.

gah, how did I forget Dune!?  I've read the first 3, and been warned away from any after that.  My brief research on their plots on wikipedia inclines me to avoid them too.

Hey guys. I'm pretty new (first set was RTR). My best (non-infinite) play was swinging with a 217/217 Wild Beastmaster, a 600/600 Kalonian Hydra, and 217 1/1 Saproling tokens for over 147,000 damage

heh, I have a deck that can, in theory, pull off that sort of thing (coat of arms goes a long way toward increasing that damage too).  unfortunately between me playing that, and another friend playing his elf deck, the rest of the people we play with have developed counter strategies to green weenie decks.

Agree that Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are the superior entries in that series.  I've read Ender's Game at least 5 times since I first saw it on a summer reading list in high school.

I've read some of Asimov's Foundation series, but I didn't really like it.  Nightfall, which he cowrote, is really interesting though.  I have also read some Heinlen.  Starship Troopers was really interesting, though a bit overtly political, but Time Enough for Love and Stranger in a Strange Land were just weird, especially all of the gratuitous sex (Time Enough for Love features a main character who has sex with his own mother as well as female clones of himself...).  Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy is pretty good, though again a bit overtly political.

Recently I have also been reading Ursula K. LeGuin's Hainish Cycle books which range from Pulp adventure like Rocanon's World (which I only bought because it was 50 cents and the cover featured people flying on winged tigers) to explorations in strange physiology like The Left Hand of Darkness, and actually are somewhat similar to the Cosmere books with their behind the scenes history of the shared universe.

All that said, my personal library tilts much further towards Fantasy than Sci-Fi

Well, Vin and Elend bothered me, but they did have some good moments in later books (also the bad ones though), so I wasn;t as bothered as with Sarene, who was really just going around and falling in love with everyone who behaved at least a little like Raoden. As for b ): After one meeting? Few hours long? I don't see it at all. 

 

But Vin/Zane. Oh, my god, I'v completely forgot about Vin/Zane. That was just weird, simply weird. 

The one thing I will give Vin/Zane is that Vin being interested in literally the only other mistborn she's seen in years (or like a year, whatever the timeframe between the end of the first and beginning of the second book, I think its a year), and the sparring/fighting nature of their first few meetings both make that relationship feel a bit more natural to me.  That said, it really is weird.

I don't view it as derailment to discuss your position, as that is the point of this thread.

 

I'm not going to try and convince you that you are wrong, but rather merely point some details out you may have missed. Then I'm going to agree with you on a part of your post.

 

For Elantris, you seem to be under the impression that when Sarene and Raoden meet face to face in the novel it is their first meeting. That...is not true. It is mentioned a total of two times (If I counted correctly) within the novel that Sarene and Raoden had been communicating for months via their Seons. Most of the romance in that novel occured off screen, prior to page one.

 

For Alloy of Law, Marasi has spent much of her time studying Wax and Wayne. To her, the two of them are heroes. From my reading of the novel, I understood her initial infatuation to be mostly fangasms at actually meeting these two legendary crime fighters. I know for a fact that the internet is full of girls who feel the same way about Tom Hiddleston. I would think it logical to be jealous that her cousin is the one engaged to such an icon.

 

As for Era 1 Mistborn, I totally agree with you. Vin falling for Elend was a bit too ridiculous for me. I can understand being infatuated, given their exposure to one another. But the first time she thinks to herself "I love him," I was taken aback. She barely knew the guy!

 

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on Warbreaker. It is the romance that Brandon himself thinks he got right, and I agree with him. I won't spoil anything for you though.

 

I want to add one more romance to your list though. Adolin and Shallan. Don't get me wrong, they are adorable, but they totally "fell at first sight," and it really erks me. Yes, they went on a date or two before "getting serious," but the thoughts that Adolin has upon seeing her, and she him, gave it all away. I was quite disappointed in that turn of events.

One counterpoint on the Elantris romance: I agree that pretty much everything we get from Raoden make a lot of sense, given what we know about his relationship with Sarene prior to the events of the book, but Sarene's feelings toward Spirit after meeting him for the first time seem a bit rushed to me.

I agree with you on both the Vin/Elend and Shallan/Adolin though.  I never really bought Vin falling for Elend that quickly, or the bits where she says, very early on, that she feels like she can be herself around him.  This is a girl who has been through so much screwed up stuff that she can't even be herself around her friends, yet she is opening up, even slightly, with some guy she just met?

One shelf would be taken up by those 3 books alone, most likely.

not to mention the 2 Mistborn books coming out between now and then

I also wonder if constant gold compounding would weaken your immune system.   for example on Nalthis, if you give up your breath, and become a drab, you are more likely to contract diseases because your immune system, used to being boosted by the investiture of your breath, is suddenly running all on its own, and isnt quite up to the task (this is mentioned in the annotations, I think).   So if you were usually compounding gold, and then stopped, would it have a similar effect?

well, the limits aren't definitely established, at least not outside of the extended universe, which I have zero familiarity with.  But you can pick up bits and pieces: Yoda could lift an x-wing (about the size of a small fighter plane), and claims that size is unimportant, so force strength should be pretty impressive.  Anakin can pod race, and Qui-gonn claims it is because he is actually seeing things before they happen and reacting to them that he is able to avoid obstacles at those speeds.  probably if I felt like sitting down and watching them all i could pull out a few more data points on that.

also, someone above mentioned that a Sith might have an easier time with this, since they are less upright, and more willing to do things like shoot lightning and force choke people

How many lashings to a given projectile would it take to make it too fast to react to?

Lash up a storm of objects to overwhelm them, fall in as fast as you can, then morph the Blade when they least expect it to take out their arms maybe?

how much stormlight would that take?  and bear in mind that anakin's jedi reflexes are what allowed him to be a pod racer, so however fast those things were supposed to go is apparently not too fast to dodge if you are good (though I understand if you would prefer to ignore the prequels)

Well, it was partially a joke. Still, Windrunners are pretty powerful. Even if you discount Lashings, they can heal pretty much anything a lightsaber can do, and they're absurdly fast.

healing a lost limb takes concentration, time, and a lot of stormlight.  hardly somethign you can do on the fly in a fight.  Maybe with a highstorm constantly replenishing your stormlight.

That is a wonderful theory! But just because Brandon likes Bavadin doesn't necessarily mean the shard he holds is a "positive" shard. Look at Ati, who was apparently a very nice guy before he held ruin. The shard's intent will consume the holder eventually.

On the other hand, just because Hoid dislikes him, doesn't mean that Bavadin is in any way a bad guy, maybe he slept with Hoid's girlfriend or something (OK, probably not something quite that petty).  Also, since we know nothing about Bavadin's shard, it could be that he was a terrible person before, but the influence of his shard is improving him.  Imagine if its intent is something like empathy or forgiveness.  He could be Brandon's favorite because the story of a bad person becoming good appeals to him.  Basically, until we see a bit more of him, I don't hink we have enough evidence to form any kind of reasonable hypothesis on what he is doing.

Right, I'd forgotten the Radiant part.  I still stand by the Force reflexes being close enough to burning Atium to counter almost anything a windrunner can do though

I believe it's this WoB:

Thanks, that's what I was thinking of, it didn't come up when I did my searches, for some reason.  must hav ejust used the wrong keyword.

maybe he just means that there is a thirds set of 16 for an atium-lerasium alloy, but that isn't how I read "way more than sixteen", though admittedly thats a subjective judgement.

To be fair, Brandon does say "gemstone" when referencing the sphere, so that could back up the odiumspren idea.

Could just be a spherical cut gemstone.  Have we seen any of those in the books?  maybe a spherical cut is the optimal one for storing stormlight

As I said once, in another thread: Shardblades. With a lightsaber you can get disarmed

and then force pull it back to your hand.  probably takes about as long as it would to resummon a normal shardblade, depending on location, etc.

I always assumed that there was more than one alloy for the god metals. How else can lerasium have various enhancement and physical effects? Obviously, Mistborn and Misting creation is an enhancement effect, but where does the physical side of things come in? This is why I think that different ratios of lerasium to base metals may produce metals with different effects. 

to be honest, I thought I saw a WoB saying something to this effect, but when I went to look for it, I couldn't find it.